1) Pictures of the Colorado trip forthcoming. Athena stars in 98% of them. Literally.

2) I just sent out “The Life of Bogart Reilly,” a Clarion story, to Strange Horizons. This one split the room almost down the center. I don’t know if anyone actively disliked it but there were a lot of lukewarm reactions. It’s written in second-person and is about leprechauns. On that summary alone, I feel lukewarm towards it. But I do like the story and other Clarion folks did too, so maybe it’s an audience thing. We’ll see what Strange Horizons says, probably in about a month.

3) I finished the Kalevala yesterday at lunch and feel a little relieved. Plodding through the wedding lays (no pun intended) kind of sucked the life out of it for me. The end picked up and I appreciated the war with the residents of North Farm over the Sampo as well as the hiding of the Sun and Moon. In the end, I liked it but I didn’t love it. I’d recommend it but probably only portions. Unlike most pieces of epic poetry, the Kalevala only loosely fits into a narrative and it’s not linear at all so the reader can skip around between episodes and not miss too much.

4) The social calendar gets fast and furious coming up. This weekend is idle, but then it’s paddling the Apostle Islands, mom and dad in town for the brother’s anniversary party, a few weekends later it’s backpacking in the Porkies in the UP. Those three items mean about 30 hours of driving between them and the Colorado trip was about 50 hours spread over nine days last week. I don’t mind driving, but not that much.

5) I realized last night how to stop terrorism and that’s through art. Just like Peter Tosh’s plainly-stated No Nuclear War effectively ushered in the end of the nuclear arms race (revisionist historians credit Ronald Reagan f or this feat), what the world need now is an artist brave enough to make an album called No Terrorism and, as long as it bounced to a reggae beat, the problem would soon be over.